How GOOD OMENS Gave Me Hope As A Trans College Student

Lately, I’ve been fascinated about the way in which the books we learn form us and, even in fantastical settings, give us home windows into potentialities for understanding and dealing by our personal challenges. I believe that’s one of the crucial significant issues a narrative can do, particularly for many who really feel they’ve been put in insufferable circumstances. As chaplain Vanessa Zoltan writes in her memoir Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice, “A willingness to survive is about believing in the possibility of a better future. Survival is about hope.”

Good Omens, the apocalyptic satire novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, is a kind of books for me. It got here into my life once I was at a crossroads that I didn’t know learn how to go. I used to be a school pupil who had just lately come out as a transgender man, making an attempt to reconcile my spiritual upbringing and seek for non secular that means with my queerness. I couldn’t do away with both; they had been inherent elements of me. Yet bringing them collectively appeared unimaginable.

I attended BYU, a Mormon college in Northern Utah within the years straight following two queer historic milestones, one great and one horrible. Gay marriage was legalized throughout the United States in 2015. And a number of months after this ruling, the Latter-Day Saint church would announce its baptism ban for youngsters of LGBTQ dad and mom (later reversed in 2019, partially due to member backlash).

At this time, the queer pupil group USGA was not allowed to carry conferences on campus. The few LGBTQ books out there on the college library had been accessible solely on maintain from the restricted part — amongst different books with such disturbing histories or topics that it despatched a message to homosexual college students that they had been unwelcome there.

I definitely felt that method, suspicious that the one cause I used to be allowed there in any respect was as a result of they hadn’t ironed out insurance policies to expel transgender college students simply but, a hunch since confirmed right.

The religion I’d grown up with taught me to acknowledge the divine price in each individual, together with that everybody deserved to be handled with compassion. I believed that within the deepest a part of my coronary heart, and I nonetheless do. But the way in which BYU administration handled its queer college students was anything. Our motives for attending the college, our religion, our morality, and our price as human beings had been continually questioned.

Often it felt as if I had been strolling a tightrope underneath risk of expulsion that many individuals suspected and even hoped I’d fall from. I simply felt so alone. I prayed rather a lot and I began to attend assist teams for transgender folks raised within the church. But whereas each introduced me consolation, they didn’t at all times present clear solutions about how I used to be to maneuver ahead within the quick time period. I nervous that I’d make the unsuitable choice.

It was 2017 when I discovered Good Omens on the library — not within the restricted part, regardless of its ribbing on the extra bureaucratic facet of faith and its description of the character Aziraphale as showing to be “gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.”

Aziraphale is an fascinating character — he’s an angel much less interested by bringing in regards to the apocalypse than caring for his antiquarian bookshop. In some very small method, I might relate to the internal battle he appeared to face. He had a really particular position that he’d been skilled his complete life to fill, issues he was instructed he was purported to need with out given a cause why. It felt extra like bureaucratic dogma than God’s plan. And so, it didn’t ring true to him.

Ultimately he finds companionship in Crowley, one other character who’s likewise an outcast and doesn’t perceive why it’s his responsibility to fill a job that doesn’t make sense to him from a common perspective. Hearing that the apocalypse is nigh, the 2 workforce as much as subvert it and, regardless of each of their semi-incompetence so far as their particular fingers within the plot goes, they succeed. Whatever God’s ineffable plan is, it’s finally past each of their understandings, nevertheless it appears to align with their instincts: that there’s worth in treating the world we reside in and others with compassion now as an alternative of throwing everybody and the whole lot underneath the bus with the hand-waving notion that “the world will end, anyways.”

What does any of this should resonate with some queer faculty pupil looking for their place on this planet? For begin, it made me really feel as if I didn’t should have all of the solutions now about what I needed my future to appear like. Nobody has all the solutions. It was even potential that I might go my complete life with out discovering the solutions to the precise questions I had.

It struck me then that whereas Aziraphale didn’t totally perceive what his objective was within the grand scheme of issues, he appeared to really feel nearer to understanding when he was with these he cared about. That yr, I met different transgender college students grappling with related conflicts as me. Not solely did I really feel much less alone, however I felt nearer to some better understanding of what issues in life the extra I linked with them. Life is complicated and tough, however the closest I’ve ever gotten to an understanding of “the infinite,” so to talk, is when spending time with these I really like and doing what I can to assist them with their very own journeys.

A lot has occurred in my life since I first learn Good Omens six years in the past. Against the percentages, I completed my diploma. I met somebody who loves me for who I’m, which I by no means thought I’d discover, and acquired married. I write tales of my very own now that I hope will convey consolation and escapism to individuals who want it. Things after faculty have been complicated in their very own methods, however I’m extra content material with uncertainty than I used to be then. I attempt to take every day because it comes and, when challenges come up, do what I imagine is the proper factor and be taught from my errors. That’s all any of us can do.

Reading Good Omens didn’t resolve all the conflicts I used to be feeling as a pupil. That’s not likely the aim of it; as I mentioned earlier, it’s satire. Its primary objective is to poke enjoyable and entertain, if something. But it helped me really feel much less alone within the information that just about nobody understands life in its entirety.

Earth is an absurd place. But by making an attempt to deal with others kindly and recognizing that’s extra necessary than making an attempt to unravel unanswerable questions, possibly I’ll perceive at the very least a bit extra sometime.